The Research

Important to Know About the Research:

1) The vast majority of medical studies have been devoted to new drugs and procedures. If you DON’T find evidence about how a wellness therapy impacts a particular health issue, it does NOT mean that therapy is proven NOT to be effective - it means the evidence doesn't exist. Studies completed, whether the evidence is for or against - are searchable here.

2) These databases are clinical tools used by medical professionals, and you will inevitably face some confusing medical-ese. Don’t be intimidated, just jump in. (And ask a medical professional to help you decode it, or pose questions in our “Conversations” area.)

The Databases

Natural Standard: An international research collaboration that systematically reviews (and limits its focus to) scientific evidence on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Founded in 2000, Natural Standard assigns a grade to each CAM therapy, reflecting the level of available scientific data for or against the use of each therapy for a specific medical condition.

Natural Standard is subscription-based, and each of the database’s monographs aggregates data from other resources like AMED, CANCERLIT, CINAHL, CISCOM, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, HerbMed, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Medline and NAPRALERT – and 20 additional journals. Data analysis is performed by healthcare professionals conducting clinical work and/or research at academic centers, using standardized instruments pertaining to each monograph section.

The Cochrane Library: British epidemiologist Archie Cochrane is regarded as the originator of the Evidence-Based Medicine concept (in the 1950s). And the Cochrane Library is a collection of very high-quality medical databases, which have, at their core, the Cochrane Reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of well-conducted, randomised controlled trials - the "gold standard" in Evidence-Based Medicine.

The Cochrane Library is a subscription-based database but offers free access to abstracts.

PubMed: A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, PubMed was released in 1996 as a free digital archive of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed comprises 20-million-plus citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals and online books from around the world. Some 11.5 million articles are listed with their abstract and 3.1 million articles are available in full-text for free.

TRIP: The TRIP Database, launched in 1997, is a search engine designed to allow clinicians to quickly find answers to their medical questions using the best available evidence. Trip’s founders realized medical professionals were being forced to perform time-consuming searches at multiple websites to get at the most relevant information. So, they designed TRIP as a meta-search engine, allowing users to both simultaneously search thousands of databases, medical publications and resources, as well as easily filter the results: limiting searches to the most stringent, highest-quality medical evidence or expanding them to include results like patient information, news articles, etc.